Reddit is, in the short term, driving more external users towards creating user accounts while in the long term removing one of the major value funnels for why they would (i.e. the quality of comments, particularly in certain niche communities/about niche topics).
This will give them a short term "bump" at the cost of the site's long term relevance (as it falls down Google's search results rankings, due to loss of clicks as people stop looking to Reddit as a source of info). Most of the recent moves on Reddit are like this, it feels like the entire site is being turned into a pump and dump scheme.
I think there is a general trend away from user-generated content as a business model, because that content can be a bit salty.
Reddit might just be cashing out because the wave they rode has already crested.
AKA the fate of every site that is a collection of usergenerated content with an ad based business model. If you want to get serious about monetization then you need to actively curtail any content that is not "advertiser friendly" which in most cases means alienating your core content generators, case in point, Tumblr.
Why do we accept that such a short-lived company (less than one human generation) is "a good run", just because it's software? If Tesla turned into a "classic pump and dump scheme", nobody would say "Well, Tesla is 16 years old. They've had a good run."
Also,for me, it's still a great social media site that lets me talk anonymously about almost anything.
The beauty of reddit is that serious decline and toxicity only seems to happen within subs. If a sub becomes really bad, you just move on to other subs that are less toxic. Still plenty of great subcommunities there.
In the past few months, I've found that I only check "Today I Learned", and even that only once every day or so.
I find the discussion here to be much more mature and insightful than any of the tech related subreddits. I had written it off as reddit being a young-persons domain and me getting old, but it could just be that reddit is losing it's edge.
You say that but... what is an alternative? I literally don't know where to go.
Like sports? /r/nfl /r/nba /r/insertsporthere
Like vr? /r/oculus /r/vive /r/insertothervrhere
And then just all the random stuff that is somewhat interesting...
I have such a love/hate relationship with reddit but I don't see any alternative.. especially if you like to actually discuss about topics.
As users learn that Reddit links aren't useful sources of information, they'll click less, which means the relevance between the search term and Reddit goes down. Ultimately reducing Reddit's ranking, regardless of if the Googlebot is allowed to index the content.
People often mix up indexing and ranking. Indexing is if you're even in the results set, but ranking is where. Reddit might, technically, still be in the results set but if it isn't on page 1 for a given search it may have well not be.
Since the web is based around single domains, the source runs behind those domains, this balkanizes what we see and who runs it, creating a winner take all dynamic. Unknowingly, the structure of the web makes it ideal to supplant public protocols for private walled gardens. Sure you can use a "standard" client to connect, but you are relying on the good of the owner, who can _pivot_ at any time.
I don't think that a co-founder would ever make such a short-sighted decision.
Several people I know (me included) refuse to use Pinterest because you can't browse without an account.
#NotMyInternet
It also feels like social media platforms are starting to die faster than they can be replaced. In the past MySpace died but people could move to Facebook, Facebook shifted to emphasizing the feed over groups but people could move to Reddit, but I'm not sure what people could move to if Reddit becomes non-viable.
Is this just me?
People always seem to brush off this kind of comment when I see it discussed, usually the argument is "well, you're a software developer / superuser, normal people don't care about these things." It will be interesting to see where the breaking point actually is; I've always felt that platform users deserve a little more respect than that. The linked identity thing is especially frustrating for me.
I stopped posting to facebook in 2010 (still using it to keep in touch via messenger and see event invites, and to avoid alienating extended family), but I used to have an instagram account with a fun theme that I only shared with a few friends. What was fun and relatable for my friends was confusing and obtuse to my family. Even the account username was embarrassing in that context. So I always kept them separate, explicitly saying "no, I don't want to attach this to my facebook account." Then one day, it just sort of happened? I can't remember if I was tricked by a dark pattern or if they just forcibly fused the accounts YouTube-Google style, but that day instagram immediately lost all usefulness to me and I haven't been on since. For me as a user, social media has always kind of felt this way.
I'm curious to see what will happen to reddit and its communities, and even more curious to see whether the next generation sees internet anonymity as a cool feature. When I was growing up, it felt like being able to form an alternate identity online was almost the whole point, but I guess back then there were fewer avenues to cultivating your identity as a personal brand for profit.
I read your comment as a really strong case for platform co-operativism -- multi-stakeholder democracy for online platforms: not just owners making decisions, but users and maybe employees together with owners. Generally, democratic currents (whether government or corporate) only emerge through changes in our collective sense of "how things should be".
I'm hoping we all start to realize we're serfs on all these platforms, and start wondering "hey, we're generating most of this wealth... why aren't we given a say in decision-making?"
It's happening to imgur and Reddit now. Time to find the next big thing.
And Stack Overflow: [Why is StackOverflow trying to start audio?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288768) [Ads on Stack Overflow are increasingly \[terrible\]](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/329547/ads-on-se-si...)
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/the-1st-thing-alexis-ohanian...
A lot of these platforms seem VC-funded or publicly traded, and they are based on growth. So they probably see growth slowing down, and this is an effort to squeeze more numbers out of it. Hopefully for them, they can pivot their business plan on to something not growth-based.
This is a common pattern: growth is like a drug for tech startups. Cut it, and they will do all they can to have it again, even if they have to alienate their current user-base for this.
As I often browse reddit in private mode, this probably just means that I'll waste less time on that website; I'm not going to bother logging in if I didn't already.
My $0.02 is that it is a shift from ad-driven approaches (as in showing ads) to consensus shaping approaches that focus on data mining.
The huge quantities of bad actors -- idiots, assholes, paid trolls, blatant propagandists -- also requires mitigation.
We've had locks and walled gardens for hundreds of years, and human nature hasn't changed. No surprise the same thing is happening on the intrawebs.
In the past, a lot of non-technical people posted to usenet newsgroups and connected to IRC for online chat.
I think the most interesting story in social networks is the collapse of core Facebook as the prime mover. I think there is still a lot of room for more Pinterests and Snapchats yet, which could further diversify the space and dilute core Facebook's mind share. The young people not caring about Facebook thing, has clearly graduated to a permanent setting, it's not going back (the next group are not going to suddenly care about FB). TikTok has demonstrated some of what is possible most recently.
Very well can be. Social media in their current form belong to corporations rather than users. Therefore sooner or later they start making decisions that are hostile to users. To make an analogy, these online societies are not stable because they resemble a monarchy, where a corporation (the monarch) must use its own judgement on how to govern its online society. Which proven to be a rather unsustainable governance model.
Until online societies switch to self-government similar to modern democracies (elected government, elected judges, payment collection, public expense reporting, etc.) they will likely continue to be unsustainable and rather short-term.
I never knew if the interesting people found a new home, or disbanded, but I sure miss when fun stuff happened there.
- The ability to use one login and interface across multiple boards/subject areas.
- The ease of communicating between different boards either via links, cross posts, or some form of aggregation.
- Features that over time allow a post to become one that can be recognized as well regarded by the community. These could include good support for listing important posts in the subreddit information, the ability to tag posts, and the ability to archive posts.
- The natural support for media and links. Although to be fair, the media support is actually provided by sites that grew up around Reddit like Imgur.
Reddit may not be social in the sense that, as another poster points out, it is built around following topics rather than users. However, the degree to which it allows different topics and communities to interconnect allows relationships to form that function as a society. For example, a post on the Male Fashion Advice subreddit on how to be more presentable might link to a series of posts on the Male Hair Advice subreddit that have become well regarded in the community.
By way of comparison, on conventional forums there is often little interaction even between sub-forums in the same forum let alone between different forums. Support for media also tends to be more limited.
I think the demand is still there. There's a power vacuum just waiting for someone to fill it. But the replacement can't just be "like Facebook but run by people slightly less creepy". You've got to fix some other root issues.
It's similar to the argument you here when people say "they youth arent into facebook anymore, now they use xxxx." That's nice and all, but as long as they get facebook when they graduate high school or go to college, facebook wins. It doesnt need to be hip and cool if its the network gluing everyone together. Did the white pages or yellow pages need to be cool to be useful?
Obviously old.reddit.com doesn't have these issues, but I'm pretty sure the session on smartphone used the new site, and that let me keep reading without any interruptions too.
Either way, if Reddit does this, that's it. Not returning to the site. The internet doesn't need all these walled gardens, and it's worrying how this is going to affect how info is preserved for future generations.
Maybe they were testing something? or did this as a trial balloon? or canceled it because of backlash?
I use Reddit mainly on phone, via browser because I use tabs and old.reddit.com because its the most content dense view and and is the fastest view (no stupid js loading icon thankyou). I'm not there, like I'm not here, for the design. I'm visiting for the content.
Reddit.com front page takes about three seconds to load with stupid blocking js, old takes about second before I can start consuming. Apps are no better.
Well, if they do I'm out. The new is, and always has been, a steaming pile. I mean, people can't even confidently reply to who they think they are and often reply to the OP instead of a comment (I see this every single day in multiple threads) and as a mod I absolutely hate the way new Reddit is set up on the mod side.
New Reddit is also just flat out hideous in appearance. One of the reasons I've paid for Reddit for years is so I could strip custom themes to keep a plain experience not unlike HN. New Reddit is like 'Hey guys!!!!!! We discovered pastels, omg omg omg do you want to see pictures because here are a bunch of pictures loaded rather large that you didn't ask to see, pictures, yay pictures, omg omg pictures!"
Apollo (iOS) provides a nice and clean design, as does Joey (Android) which copies the style of the former. Even on the desktop, the experience is smooth and manageable, by using uMatrix and RES, whether you are browsing old.reddit or not. I don't understand the hesitancy in using these enhancements to enrich your user experience.
Even if it's infinitely better? I have been using the 'reddit is fun' app for years, and it's the best experience by far. I hate even using my computer to browse reddit to be honest, I would rather sit and be comfortable with a phone. Can't say that about most sites.
On the opposite end, I hate browsing hackernews on my phone so I almost never do. I can't click anything because it's so small. So I just end up using it on the desktop, which is fine I guess.. but it limits my interaction with this site.
The “view discussion” and “view more comments” buttons are just utter, utter shite. It is near impossible to read all of the comments.
It’s clearly designed to satisfy KPIs other than actually reading a post. More like superficially bouncing from one post to the next, dropping an upboat and off you go.
I sincerely hope all these sign in-only forums with great SEO like Quora and Reddit suffocate on their own rot.
As you say, its not present on ud. or old.
Hopefully the results of said test show enough of a drop in traffic/conversions for the variation with the 'login requirement' that they drop the idea altogether.
Perhaps they are testing it with a subset of users?
Digg lessons weren't apparently not learned
Maybe i outgrew the typical user demographic, but i think its just corny (I'm talking about r/all).
The only social media I really like is Pinterest. It always gets ignored in these conversations and besides a few minor things, there development never seems to bother the base.
I've been a user since 2006. When reddit blew up in popularity, many subs massively declined in quality as is to be expected. Niche subs, however, remained pretty great.
But reddit as an organization is beyond repair at this point. Changes like this are now par for the course.
Worse even, reddit is now engaged in censoring subs. The most obvious and possibly most disturbing example is the quarantine of r/the_donald on political grounds.
We tried every single open or alternative Reddit and they were all garbage. And trust me when I said we tried everything.
They are either awful early-2000s PHP-clone style sites, some stupid fringe political communities which push away mainstream users, or some weird moderation rules.
https://saidit.net/ was the closest clone but they had some bizarre "Pyramid of Debate" [1] moderation thing that seemed culty among their hardcore members, which our sub members got turned off from.
But ultimately it's the lack of good mobile apps for these sites that pushed us away and we never managed to rebuild the community.
Recreating a better Reddit is a project I've long been interested in doing myself.
[1] https://infogalactic.com/w/images/thumb/e/ef/The_Pyramid_Of_...
They should have never been censored, it was a politically inspired move, and a disgusting one to have made.
I mean, I agree they should have been banned from day one basically.. but to say it's a slap on the wrist is odd because absolutely no one has to read any of their trash unless you specifically go there. Most random reddit users probably don't even know of td, let alone would actually go there voluntarily.
That being said.. I think it's unconscionable that reddit allows that subreddit to exist.. it's literally a breeding ground for violence and hate thought/speech.
Perhaps we will see a diaspora of such clones?
I don't know if that's on purpose or it's just like that. But there seems to be a big difference in the quality depending on whether you are logged in or not.
As for the reddit site itself I wonder what is the ratio of old.reddit viewers vs reddit viewers are. I've used reddit for over a decade and absolutely hate the new style I only go to old.reddit if that changes and only new reddit is available I'll abandon my account (or sell it to Russians ha! Kidding.).
I moderate a top 100 sub and if the built-in stats are to be believed, the recent breakdown is something like:
= Pageviews =
40% apps
28% old reddit
17% mobile reddit
15% new reddit
= Unique visits =
41% mobile reddit
27% new reddit
24% apps
8% old reddit
This doesn't really capture the ratio of contributors who use each (or perhaps, more interestingly, number of contributions per platform), but it's hard for me to guess that accurately since new-reddit detractors are a very vocal group.
--- Monthly uniques (200k total):
New Reddit: 55%
Mobile Web: 20%
Reddit Apps: 15%
Old Reddit: 10%
--- Monthly Pageviews (3M total):
New Reddit: 30%
Mobile Web: 10%
Reddit Apps: 30%
Old Reddit: 30%
So in our case, while the ones using Old Reddit are the fewest in number, they are also the most engaged.
I guess I shouldn't be so afraid of old going away soon then :)
I'm using old Reddit, on mobile.
I just checked one of my subreddits and for the Pageviews stats I see graphs for old reddit 3,500 vs new reddit 15,000.
Unique visits: old 1,200 vs new 9,370
I find that much of a difference surprising.
And Usenet even included posting a single message to multiple groups, and people from both can respond.
Any resources you can point me to? I’m really interested in these concepts.
(G) Google way to restrict search to signed-in users: If you're on Chrome (biggest market share) and you're signed into Chrome (big share also) then you auto-sign into your google account. PS: Not sure if they rollback on this change.
Why the (G) way works? Because it's non-obtrusive way to force user to login.
I dont use FB at all because of in part the barrier to entry.
I like this one:
We have to pay for quality. If we're not going to pay with dollar bills, we pay with privacy.
> If we're not going to pay with dollar bills, we pay with privacy.
Paying with ads is also possible.
All of the hard work is done for free by the mods of each subreddit. But they have no piece of the pie when Reddit goes IPO. The entire value is predicated on an Army of free workers that get nothing when the site IPOs.
I already had an account when Quora did it, and that made me use it less (wasn't always signed in, wasn't always willing to sign in - e.g. incognito sessions). For a long while, I started going back less and less - was only brought back occasionally by their emails which were still pretty good.
Recently the emails got so bad that I unsubscribed (I kinda expect to stop visiting the site completely). So I'm guessing I'm not alone in reducing my engagement - the quality of the whole site seems to have gone dramatically down.
Now it demands I pay.
I wonder if there is a way to permanently exclude medium.com from all my search results.
(yeah, I know, someone else make what I want . . . )
(or, we should have just fixed spam on Usenet . . . )
I appreciate the correction.
A month ago I ended up getting the app again because the web version became essentially unusable (they did some strange change where clicking on a link gave you the top three/five comments and then other posts from the same subreddit, wtf?).
I wonder what short term pipe they're smoking in the product department.
Vanilla reddit is unusable.
And:
1. If you don't mind being constantly redirected to www by arbitrary links.
2. Having old blocked by robots.txt from search-engine indexing.
3. The likelihood of old disappearing at some point in the future.
I saw that future a couple of years ago and noped the heck out.
This is totally backwards. Valuing pure signup rates over the user experience of hundreds of millions, who may already have accounts but dont feel like logging in, or just simply want to read content and sign up another day, is what happens when marketing/business people hijack a business over product/UX people.
This is a very obvious vanity metric issue to anyone who has run a popular website. And most people do it to appease VCs/investors... Reddit is already mature, so there's no justification to artificially increasing growth at the expense of the wider product.
For context on them attempting to catalog subs about a month ago a Reddit admin messaged me unsolicited (apparently a lot of people). I have no problem sharing this since they randomly contacted me via the site, I've never done contract work for them, and there was no request to keep it private (and apparently hey just randomly mass messaged people):
>Hey there! I work at Reddit and I’m reaching out because we’re looking for experienced redditors who might be interested in taking on some paid contract work for us. I have no idea if you’d be interested, but I figured I’d drop you a line.
I replied requesting more info
>Great! Essentially, this work would be reviewing lists of subreddits to help categorize what they are about and what content is in them. This would probably be maximum 10h/wk (no minimum) over a couple of weeks, though if it goes well there’s likely to be more. It pays $15/hr.
I said sure and was told this
>Can you send an email to redacted@reddit.com with your resume and your experience on Reddit and we can work on scheduling a time to chat about the opportunity? (No worries if your profession or line of work isn’t related to Reddit. We're looking for reliable people with existing Reddit knowledge; reviewing your resume will help us better understand your background.) Upon reviewing the resumes, we will schedule 30-minute phone calls with selected candidates to share details on the project work and conduct interviews.
I did about 20 minutes later and within an hour got an email saying thanks but no thanks, there were tons of people interested and they're already full.
That, or impersonate a search engine to access. They wouldn't block that, would they?
And that system will also follow the same path (unless it is started by an already-very-rich group of techies who value status more than money).
Just think: if you were fabulously wealthy, then burning a few million a year to have a completely free, non-commercial social site would be perfectly reasonable. Of course, eventually you would die and someone would then begin the usual path with your legacy...
I am able to read threads just fine without an account, in this case safari on my Mac. Safari on the iPhone is fine too.
UX is everything, Hackernews told me.
Where is your god now?
